Donald Trump and the Limits of My Imagination
In the fall of 2016, in the weeks leading up to the election, something happened to me. I began to hate Donald Trump. I mean really hate him. This thing I felt was not the rage nor horror nor disbelief I’d been feeling for months; it was deep and raw, inflamed and unfamiliar. It was a tumor, a sickness, an oozing internal deformity.
I’ve always told my fiction students that hate is the greatest enemy of the writer — not because it’s the opposite of love, but because it’s the opposite of empathy, of understanding. Hate, with its broad chest and wide shoulders, stands mute and immovable in the pathways of human connection. It limits point of view, impedes perspective. It devours imagination. So when I felt this hatred, I tried to combat it the way I normally try to stop judging people: I tried to imagine my way into Donald Trump’s head.
As a writer, I’ve spent my life trying to imagine what other people are thinking. And I’ve gotten the greatest joy and comfort out of finding my way into the minds and hearts of people whose circumstances and experiences and beliefs are vastly different from my own. So I took the challenge to the students in my first year creative writing seminar, as a lesson in point of view: pick a candidate with whom you feel you have nothing in common and write in that person’s voice about the death of a pet. The death could take place present day, or it could be a recollection of the death of a childhood pet. Dig deep, I told them. Don’t be tempted to slip into satire. Keep yourself out of it. Be honest. Find this person’s truest voice. Make this person a person.
I was pleased with this idea because I thought it was something my first-years could tackle. It was a bit of a softball, really, the prompt about the pet. What more efficient way to crack a tough nut, to make us feel something for an unlikable character, than to take away his dog? I did the exercise along with my students, sitting at the head of the table in the classroom, listening to their pens scratching away. I knew that few of them were writing about Hillary Clinton, but that most of them were writing about Trump. I sat with a pen in my sweaty fingers, wrote a few words that rang hollow, crossed them out, tried from a different angle, still hollow, another sentence, dishonest, tainted with obvious disdain, another sentence, a unreliable narrator, wicked and deluded, still clearly in my perspective and not his. I tried every way I knew to inhabit Donald Trump’s point of view, to imagine him as an actual human being grappling with loss, but every single time I hit a border wall of my own construction, one fortified by hate. Imagination failure; access denied. And thus, hatred unabated. All the lessons, all the tricks I’d taught my students over the years for breaking through the walls that keep us from each other, came up short.
Surely we can forgive me this: one brain inaccessible, due to one heaping portion of hate, directed at one literally unimaginably terrible human being. But hate is a virus, and now the virus was loose in my imagination; once I believed there was a limit to what I could imagine, the sickness spread.
As a result of this illness, over the last four exhaustingly cruel years of Trump’s America, I’ve given up trying to understand tens of millions of people. As the country wallows in a chaotic stew of preventable death and unchecked prejudice, I have stopped trying to concoct the inner lives of my neighbors who have Trump signs in their yards. My human and artistic energies no longer extended to the drivers around me with Trump bumper stickers, the woman at Target with the homemade Trump 2020 mask, the man at the gas station with the MAGA hat. I am in the unusual (and enviable) position of having no close family members or friends who support Trump, so to access this mindset I have to rely fully on my imagination, and my imagination has taken a pass on this particular journey. I have lost my desire to understand you, woman at Target with your grandchild’s hand in yours. I don’t have any idea who you are, and worse, I no longer care. You do not pique my curiosity. All my wonder, all my fascination with the human experience, all the things that made me most love being a writer — putting myself in the shoes and minds of strangers, finding common needles buried inside mountainous haystacks, figuring out what makes people tick, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt — all these things I believed and preached my whole life, have been blunted and obscured by Trump. By hate.
I don’t think I’ll feel this way forever. But now, after Trump, I’ll always know I have it in me to feel this way.
Year after year, I tell my students: if you think you don’t know someone, and especially if you think they are nothing like you, try imagining what crosses they bear, what things they carry, what baggage they haul from year to year.
Woman at Target, I have been poisoned by the Trump virus, and right now I do not care about you enough to imagine who you are. Right now, when I open your imaginary bags, they are empty.
